Ex-communist Europe

Internet censorship in Russia

Lurk no more

ON NOVEMBER 11th Russian internet-users began to notice that Lurkmore, a sometimes funny, often vulgar website with a cult following, was no longer accessible. Lurkmore (pictured) is a user-generated encyclopedia, a Russian-language wiki Wikipedia focusing on obscure internet jokes and memes, or what its co-founder, Dmitry Homak, calls “the kind of stuff said by the characters on SouthPark”. Although no one had officially told Mr Homak anything, it soon became clear that the site had fallen into the Russian government’s “Single Register” of web content to be banned under a law passed by the Duma in June.

The law came into force on November 1st. It requires Roskomnadzor, the state’s media monitoring agency, to maintain a list of content to be banned in three categories: child pornography, instructions or propaganda for drug use, and material promoting suicide. The law also allows for a site or page to be blocked in accordance with any court order: a vague, potentially wide-ranging clause that has given rise to worries over censorship, given the frequent politicisation of the Russian judicial system.

The register itself is not public, but any user can check to see if a particular web page or site is blocked through a state-run portal. So far, more than 180 sites have been added to the list, the government says—though that number will surely grow, as various state agencies and local courts make their own additions, and internet users submit potentially offensive material. Lurkmore ended up on the list for its entry on “dudka,” which means “penny whistle,” or in its slang usage, a bong or some other pipe for smoking marijuana.

For the first two weeks of November, few people paid attention to the implementation of the blacklist or which sites had ended up there. But the case of Lurkmore drew immediate attention on the Russian-language internet—itself a rapidly growing community of around 50m users, representing an online market that will soon overtake Germany’s. However lowbrow its humour or marginal its popularity, Lurkmore was the kind of generally innocuous, admirably irreverent site whose troubles now seem a harbinger of online censorship to come.

The lack of transparency in the blocking process raises further questions. As Irina Levova of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications notes, Lurkmore appears to have been blocked by IP address, a technique that has two obvious drawbacks: first, offending sites can simply change IP, as Lurkmore itself did, to avoid the ban; and two, such an approach risks blocking access to dozens if not hundreds of other, unrelated sites that may share the same IP. For Ms Levova, Lurkmore is “vivid example” of the many drawbacks of the new law.

Both before and after its passage, Ms Levova and colleagues visited the Duma, the Ministry of Communication, and Vyacheslav Volodin, the chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin. They offered their technical advice, suggesting tweaks to the wording of the law and its implementation, so as to be less of a burden on internet companies and less of a disruption for users. “We were ready for dialogue,” Ms Levova says, “but nobody listened to us.” In the end, Ms Levova says, the suggestions of experts were “ignored” and the law came into force with little thought as to how it would be carried out.

According to research published by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two experts on the Russian security services who have studied internet controls in Russia, the only way internet service providers (ISPs) can comply with the new law is through “deep packet inspection,” or DPI. With DPI, ISPs can filter internet traffic into separate streams, making it easier to block particular services, such as Skype, or pages, such as a certain Facebook group. DPI provides the technical backbone for internet filtering and control in China and Iran, among other countries.

Yet Mr Soldatov notes that two factors keep Russia from having a Chinese-style firewall—at least for now. The first is that the law does not block or criminalise the use of proxy browsers that mask what sites a user visits and keep browsing anonymous. But Russia may be headed in this direction: a September article in Izvestia said the Duma will soon add amendments to the internet law banning such services, including the popular service Tor, which masks online activity. Second, Mr Soldatov says is that Russia has not outlawed the use of secure browsing protocols, https, used by Facebook, Gmail, and other sites with sensitive personal data. But he says that some ISPs have already been approached by Russian security agencies and told to prepare for such a possibility.

All this is expensive and unwieldy. In a rush to pass the law and with little time or enthusiasm to listen to outside experts, the Duma did not allocate any additional funding or personnel for maintaining the internet blacklist. Deputies “thought it would work on its own somehow”, says Ms Levova. For its part, Roskomnodzor is not particularly enthusiastic about having to update the register twice a day, a chore for which it received no new staff.

Meanwhile, experts have put the cost for ISPs at implementing the new law at $10 billion. Their reason for resisting the law is more financial than political or moral. But relief may be coming: a Duma deputy from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, Robert Schlegel, has suggested that the government will pick up their costs for installing and maintaining DPI.

All of this has the IT industry in Moscow worried; it’s hard to make business plans and raise investment when it’s unclear how the internet will function in the coming months and years. Moves toward internet filtering send a contradictory signal at a time when the Russian government has made technological innovation an economic priority. As a manager in a Western technology company says, the new law makes the environment for foreign investment in the Russian technology sector "more tense and less transparent".

Putting some sugar on those sour grapes might help you accept the outcome of the presidential election.

Conservatives, dictatorships (on the left and on the right) and religious types are the biggest supporters of censorship. Liberals want openness, transparency and free speech: it's part of the definition of the term liberal.

Vladimir Putin has said that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest tragedy. All his actions since taking office have been about restoring what he sees are the glories of the Soviet Union, with himself as Stalin-in-waiting. Censorship and control of the media are only the first steps in creating a dictatorship. Look at what Hugo Chavez has done to Venezuela if you want a recent object lesson.

"Lurkmore is a user-generated encyclopedia, a Russian-language Wikipedia […]"

Correction: It's a wiki. It's most definitely not a Wikipedia. "Wikipedia" is a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, referring to its free encyclopedia projects that use wiki software. A wiki is a website with linkable, editable articles. A Wikipedia is a wiki; a wiki is not necessarily a Wikipedia. Please note the difference.

Internet censorship is just one of several censorship measures now in effect in Putin's Russia. Back in 2007 Russian authorities published a rather short list of 14 titles of books, periodicals and internet publications that were subject to a judicial order prohibiting their circulation by any methods (e.g. in print, digital, video, etc.)
It is striking how that initially modest list has been now expanded to cover not less than 1270 titles prohibited for publication and circulation on the territory of the Russian Federation. In most cases prohibitions are 'justified' by some court's decision but the real reasons remain inaccessible to the public at large. One could understand (but not always support) judicial decisions banning publications about some 'world conspiracy', or promoting nazism, but the present list has been expanded banning such topics as, for example, decades of independence struggle of the Caucasian nations (Chechnia, Dagestan, etc.), about war-time anti-Soviet resistance in Ukraine and the Baltics, and even some topics related to the 1932-33 Kremlin-inspired famine, known in Ukraine as Holodomor, that claimed some 5 million victims. Such publications are freely circulated in the West, but not in Putin's Russia.

I would highly recommend to THE ECONOMIST editors to have someone look into this aspect of Russian censorship in some detail and to make the findings available to the readers.

"Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny called on the authorities to add his personal blog to the list of the banned web-site in one of his (often funny and sarcastic) twits."

Yet one proof, the so called Russia opposition is so desperate, it wants to be put on the child abusers list to gain popularity, heh, heh, heh :D

What a bunch of losers the west paid "opposition" are. Their recent election of leadership using the net disclosed the embarrassing for the opposition in Russia fact that there is about 70 thousand west paid agents out of 50 million
internet users in Russia, what is INSIGNIFICANT number. This number is less than 1% of the Moscow population of 13 million alone.

PATHETIC, the west paid opposition in Russia is PATHETIC, what's no wonder considering the fact that the Russia people remember with disgust the times of US-supported Yeltsin DERMOcrapy when his US HIID advisers and their oligarch byproduct robbed Russia white.

The Harvard Boys Do Russia
Janine R. Wedel May 14, 1998

After seven years of economic "reform" financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia's wealth.

Essential to the implementation of Chubais's policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard's name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.'s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers' funds.

The activities of H.I.I.D. in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers. The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign policy disasters created by those said to be our "best and brightest."

Pathetic opposition? Quite possibly, but what can you expect when you see the pathetic president marching shirtless in the tundra as a publicity stunt. If such undignified behaviour brings votes to a president, what can you expect from a poorly funded opposition to the almighty KGB?

Or perhaps the lesson of the Arab Spring has been lost on the Russian government. The lesson being that you cannot put the Internet genie back in the bottle. Once it is out, you can't control what people know, or what they believe, with any success. And if you try, all you will do is hasten the day when you get tossed onto the junk heap of history.

The lesson is to go exactly the opposite direction that the Russian government has chosen.

Mere idiocy or so-called xenophobia is no excuse for this type of 100% political censorship: c'mon kids - it's salami-tactics by another name. Putin & Co. are as pathetically dishonest as they are 'stupid', as Zbig. B. said during a BBC interview a long time ago. The sad thing is that these folk are as intellectually bankrupt as their kleptocracy is corrupt. All of us will end up paying this travesty, one way or another.

Yes, indeed TE should write about language realities in ALL regions of Ukraine and in all Russia. Then, maybe, just maybe, we would see fewer ignorant comments like yours.
Meanwhile, you could provide an up-dated list of ALL publications and media sources prohibited in Putin's Russia. Make sure to include all prohibited publications or digital media critical of Putin.